“... was love she sickened at,’ Alice Munro wrote in The Beggar Maid. ‘It was the enslavement, the self-abasement, the self-deception.’ If that’s her attitude it doesn’t promise much romance for her latest collection, despite its title; and in fact the book describes not so much love as the subtle changes in loyalty ...”

“... jingoism, lies at its heart. The Oslo Accords, which launched the Palestinians on the road to self-government, bypassed the matter of Jerusalem along with the other truly difficult issues in the dispute: the right of return of the 1948 refugees, the future of the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and the borders of the Palestinian ...”

“... The heroine must be driven in some way towards the sad end made importantly tragic by a seed of self-destruction planted when she was very young. And indeed, Sonia Orwell was well equipped with potential demons in her youth. Her childhood was a colonial mess. Born in Calcutta, she had a father who died, perhaps by suicide, when she was a few months old, and ...”

“... Looking at a girl activist’s ferociously bitten nails, he riffs again: ‘It was always these self-devouring types who ended up here, hating Nike . . . It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique . . . And more ...”

“... Natalie give their work florid, off-putting titles and even worse first lines. Joshua is dour and self-pitying as a writer, while Natalie is self-aggrandising and po-faced. They are at their worst when they talk about their writing, so it’s interesting that Riley chooses to face down criticism by bringing a part of ...”

“... not having had any Swallows and Amazons, and I open up to one of the lesser literary attributes, self-pity, when I think of some of the things we were exposed to so young. But it was quite common. The most popular picture round our way – every family had one, usually above a three-bar fire – was a commercial painting called The Weeping Boy. There were ...”

“... should always weigh very heavily in the disposal of the highest legal appointments’. But the self-promotion that applications involve does not necessarily reveal the best candidates. Nor has it done much so far to redress the imbalances on the bench of gender and ethnicity. This is not because the appointments commission has been less than conscientious ...”

“... No hope for the future.” At least he could garden.’ Letters are performances of the self, of course, and Beckett knew what he was at, including flirting with self-parody. His long-time confidante and lover, Barbara Bray, well understood the game by the time she received this jolly missive from Porto Santo near ...”

“... Similar ideas about vigorous and slovenly peoples caught on quickly in colonial Africa. Zulus were self-evidently ‘martial’, even though they loafed around with their cattle; Hausa and Fulani in Nigeria were, in the words of Stuart Stephens, ‘bonny fechters’. But Churchill and his followers failed to win their case. Too many British top brass and ...”

“... as ‘children’, supposedly incapable of forming the rational political society that justified self-government. After the frontier closed, Latin American nations became the new irresponsibles. Woodrow Wilson’s Latin American experts, as they prepared for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, ranked countries ‘as mature, immature or criminal’ and came up ...”

“... There’s Molly Zane, an Australian nurse with a ‘marvellously uncivil swagger’ whose self-assurance marks her as an outsider in the west of Ireland. Then there are Sinéad’s fellow patients. There’s ‘Shane-no-one-caught-a-surname’, with all the charisma that moniker suggests (though to be fair he’s mostly unconscious); Patrick Hegarty ...”

“... One​  of the puzzling things about feminism is that it can be confused with being self-centred. If it’s good for me, a woman might say of something she wants to do – whether it’s Botox injections, running a country, writing a book or being chronically late – then it’s good for feminism! Sometimes this sort of reasoning is a necessary release; sometimes it’s a joke (on men at first, even if eventually it rebounds on women); sometimes feminism gets stuck there for a time ...”

“... is it yet entirely extinct: well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Not every item in the Duke-Edinburgh edition seems quite to count as a ‘burning beacon’, but, as this sample of Carlyle’s prose may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and ...”

“... exact, but his mild-mannered arguments culminate in emphatically radical conclusions. His sober, self-effacing prose leads the reader through a series of intricate theoretical inquiries until the trap is suddenly sprung and one is faced with the most provocative claims: chaos and tumult are to be applauded; the more nihilistic the world grows, the better; we ...”

“... otiose or actively misleading annotations and, above all, the fatuous commentary of a cynical, self-satisfied authorial persona whose only real interest is in multiplying print commodities and, therefore, his income. The aesthetics of obscurity is his greatest resource. ‘It is with Writers, as with Wells,’ he tells us. The thing to do with a shallow ...”